Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday August 24, 2007 @03:51PM
from the do-what-i-say-no-me dept.

E5Rebel writes "Business is embracing open source like never before, but the effective demise of SCO's claims against Linux doesn't mean an end to licensing problems, an analyst warns. The debate on Slashdot seems to focus on the GPL and its virtues, but there are 1,000-plus open source licenses (according to analyst Saugatuck), and businesses face having to manage multiple licenses within a single open source product. What can be done to minimize multiple-license pain for corporate open source adopters?"

Why does the large number of licenses have to be a management problem? Most the proliferation in business is the usage, not the development of open source, and a bulk of the open source licenses say you can use it however you want, it's only when you distribute it (Modified or unmodified) that you have to start worrying about exactly what is in the license.

If you count all the subtle variations (For example, BSD license with who gets credit changed) I can see it being 1000+. But that is taking a very strict definition of different FOSS licenses, and not a realistic definition that all those are basically the same thing.

Yeah, I knew you could. The average Linux distribution doesn't have anything close to a 1000 licenses in it. Stop being ridiculous. There is pretty much BSD/MIT/X11, GPL, LGPL, Mozilla, Artistic, and maybe a couple of others, depending on what apps are installed.

And in the end -- so what? FOSS licenses break down into two categories: BSD-type and GPL-type. That's it. They're all pretty much the same, especially ones that conform to the Open Source Definition, so who cares?